SSL Certificate collects information related to SSL. This is only used when you are hosting a skill on your own HTTPS endpoint, rather than using AWS Lambda.

Configuration defines your endpoint and other options, such as account linking and permissions.

Account linking lets you create a link between the Alexa user and a user account in your own system.

Permissions let you ask the user for specific personal information, such as access to the address of their device so that you can use this address in your skill to provide address-based information and customization, or read and write access to the user’s Alexa shopping list and Alexa to-do list.

Test lets you enable your skill for testing and do basic testing in the Service Simulator. You can use this to send your service commands and see the responses it returns. You can also listen to the responses in Alexa’s voice.

Publishing Information determines how the skill is presented to end users in the Alexa app. For example, you provide descriptive text and example phrases to help users understand how to use the skill, and image icons.

Privacy and Compliance contains options related to user privacy, such as the URLs for your privacy policy and terms of use.

When you create a skill, you select the language for the skill. A skill can support multiple languages. The Alexa Skills Kit currently supports:

Minimum Fields for Testing a Skill

Note that you do not need to fill in all of the required fields for testing. The minimum requirements for testing are:

Skill Information: Skill Type, Name, and Invocation Name.

Interaction Model: (Including both the intent schema and the sample utterances).

Configuration: Endpoint.

SSL Certificate (Set to one of the three options. Not required for Lambda).

Test (Set to Enabled).

When you are ready to submit the skill for certification, you must complete all of the sections. Once all required fields in a section are complete, a green check mark is displayed next to the section name. You can submit the skill for certification once all sections have the green check marks. For details about testing your skill to ensure it passes certification, see Certification Requirements for Custom Skills.

Register a New Skill

Log on to the Alexa section of the developer portal. From the developer portal console page, click Alexa.

In the Alexa Skills Kit box, click Get Started to open the Alexa Skills Kit page. This displays any skills you have already created.

Click the Add a New Skill button.

Select the Language for the skill the drop-down list. You can add additional languages after completing the initial configuration.

Also on the Configuration page, determine whether you need account linking.

If your skill doesn’t need account linking, select No.

If your skill will need account linking, but you aren’t yet ready to set these options, ignore this section and proceed to Permissions below it. The account linking options are not required to start testing, but you will need to come back and fill in this section before you can test any account-linking specific features in your skill.

Also on the Configuration page, in the Permissions section, select Device Address if your skill requires address information. Select either Full Address or Country & Postal Code, depending on your skill’s requirements. Only select this option if your skill will require address information to operate correctly. See Device Address API.

If you are hosting your cloud-based service as a web service, select the SSL option you want to use on the SSL Certificate page and choose Next. If you are hosting your service as a Lambda function, this section is not shown.

If you select I will upload a self-signed certificate, open the certificate’s .pem file in a text editor, copy the entire contents, and paste it into the provided text box.

Make sure the Test page shows that your skill is Enabled for testing. Note that if you select Full Address, you will be required to have an applicable privacy policy in place.

At this point, you should be able to test the skill using either the Service Simulator or an Alexa-enabled device.

Update the Configuration for an Existing Alexa Skill

You can edit the configuration for a skill in the developer portal. Refer back to Understanding the Configuration for details about the configuration for an Alexa skill.

Note: Once a skill is published to users, it is considered live. You cannot edit the configuration while it is live. Instead, you must create a new version. See “Creating a New Version of an Alexa Skill” in Publishing an Alexa Skill.

Note: as you test, you will likely add additional sample utterances. After adding a new utterance, there may be a short delay before the new utterance is available for testing, particularly if you want to test the utterance with your invocation name (“Alexa, ask <invocation name> to give me the horoscope for Gemini”).

Edit the Configuration for an Existing Skill

Log on to the Alexa section of the developer portal. From the developer portal console page, click Alexa.

In the Alexa Skills Kit box, click Get Started to open the Alexa Skills Kit page. This displays any skills you have already created.

Delete the configuration for an Existing Skill in Development

Log on to the Alexa section of the developer portal. From the developer portal console page, click Alexa.

In the Alexa Skills Kit box, click Get Started to open the Alexa Skills Kit page. This displays any skills you have already created.

Find the skill to change in the list and choose Delete.

Note that this completely removes the skill. All information you have entered for the skill is deleted.

You cannot delete skills that are either live or in certification.

About the SSL Options

Important: The quickest way to get started with developing and testing is to use AWS Lambda. Lambda functions do not need an SSL certificate.

When Alexa communicates with your web service, user requests and corresponding responses are transmitted over the Internet. To protect the confidentiality and integrity of this data, Alexa strictly enforces that HTTP connections are secured using SSL/TLS.

This means that the web service for a skill published to users must present a valid, trusted certificate when the connection is established and must possess the corresponding private key.

The configuration you need to get started depends on how you plan to get the SSL certificate for your web service:

If you host your web service on an endpoint for which you already have a certificate signed by an Amazon-approved certificate authority, you do not need to do any further SSL configuration.

If you host your web service with a cloud platform that provides a wildcard certificate, you do not need to do any further SSL configuration for testing.

A wildcard certificate is set up to provide SSL for multiple sub-domains. It still must be signed by a trusted certificate authority.

Check with the cloud hosting provider you are using to determine whether they provide this type of certificate to your web service.

Note that the wildcard certificate provided by your cloud platform must be signed by an Amazon-approved certificate authority.

If you create a free self-signed certificate, you can create the certificate yourself, upload it to the Developer Portal when you register the skill, and configure your endpoint to present this certificate when it connects to Alexa. See Testing a Custom Skill for instructions.